The communities of the followers of Jesus, supported on the testimony of the first disciples, witnesses of the death and messengers of the resurrection of of their Lord and Teacher, evoke and re-live through that fact whenever they get together for the celebration of the Eucharist, in fulfillment of the express mandate of the Lord in the last Dinner: " Do this in my memory ” (Lc 22,19). For a long time, how much is not known, probably during any more than one century, the Eucharistic celebration was the only commemoration of the death and of the resurrection of the Lord, certainly, every eight days, in the day called by this motive day of the Lord or Sunday.
Nevertheless, it is possible that the first Christians were continuing, at least in the beginning, celebrating the Jewish Easter. Nevertheless,for them, all whatever meant this celebration had been fulfilled in Jesus
Christ, the true Lamb of God (Jn 1.36). The apostolic preaching was insisting very much on this aspect, as it can be seen in numerous passages of the New Testament. This one seems to be the sense of the expression that can be read in San Paul's I Carta to the Corinthian ones, which mentions to Christ “ our Easter victim immolated ” (1 Cor 5,7). This phrase does not allow to still think about a Christian celebration with
weekly character that annual. In this difference of Jewish Passover.
In effect, the first testimonies of an annual Christian celebration of Passover come from half-full from century II, the Letter of the Apostles with regard to the episode of the prison of Pedro narrated in Libro of the Facts of the Apostles (cf. Hch 12.3 ss.); and the most famous paschal question that divided to the Christians of Smaller Asia (Turkey) about the moment for celebrating this celebration, if the Good Friday or the Domingo de Resurreccio'n, who we know thanks to ecclesiastical History Eusebio de Cesarea (s. IV).
The oldest description of the annual Christian celebration of Passover, including/understanding already all the Easter has arrived to us in the most interesting Itinerary of Egeria (year 381). This illustrious lady, native on all probability of territories of the Bierzo, counts on high accuracy and detail how the different commemorative celebrations were developed from the last events of the life of Our Mr. Jesus Christ. She narrates the liturgical assemblies presided over by the Bishop of Jerusalem in the own scenes where the facts took place, turned peregrination sanctuaries already. Taking notices of the readings that became, of the psalms that were sung, of the preaching and the plegarias, as well as of the celebration of the Eucaristía. This way, with the help of the Sagradas Scriptures and repeating the gestures made by the same Jesus and his disciples, with the great incentive that supposed to be such in places where the facts happened, those Christians celebrated and lived the mystery on the salvation.
In the course of time, that way to celebrate extended by all the cristiandad. The only thing that no longer could occur, being outside Jerusalem and of Earth Santa, was the experience to step on those streets and to move in that space where the events happened object of the evocación and the liturgical update. But the creative capacity of the men, stimulated by the Christian faith, took to them to imitate the liturgy of Jerusalem adapting other spaces, as much inside the churches for the deepest part, the Eucaristía, like in the streets or seats, for the displacements and the processions.
Two types of celebrations formed and developed: the properly liturgical ones, which they included/understood the proclamation of the Word of God and the Gospel, the common and sacerdotal plegaria and the sacred rites of laEucaristía; and the manifestations of which today we called popular mercy, specially the processions. That if, following the more faithfully possible data that of Gospels as far as the times and other circumstances, and to procurandorevivir the drama of the Passion, Muerte and Resurección de Christ with the greater authenticity, that is to say, meditating those mysteries and trying to be united inner, to the feelings of our Redentor. To the dramatización in the streets they contributed the images, first single later, later composing scenes. And what it could not imagine, they completed the preachers with its sermons, in which, of course, the sins and the change of conduct did not need the exhortations to the penance by.
Thus it was like, to very great characteristics, arose the Easter from the street yde the seats, like prolongation and extension of the liturgy of the churches, filling the hollows that left the offices liturgical of the churches, located from century VIII in the morning of the holy days. For that reason, the week of the year in which this takes place all riquísima commemoration of the Passover of the Gentleman calls, as everybody knows, Santao Week Greater Week. But I want to emphasize that essentially the Easter is “the sacred memory” of the paschal mystery of the fortunate Passion, death and resurrection of the Gentleman, of which we confessed in the Creed: “it suffered under the power of Poncio Pilato, was crucificado, dead and buried, it descended when infier to us and it revived to the third day”.
Like Bishop of Leon, besides to show my esteem and it considers of the Easter of our capital and without forgetting to me so many other populations that also have their own wall-plate and religious expression, desire that this particular way to remember and of revivir the final events of the life of Our Mr. Jesus Christ does not remain in the mere conceptual and anecdotal memory of facts, but that it contributes to make present his transforming value of the minds and the hearts.
+ Mons. Julián López Martín, Obispo
de León |
